Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Bob Dylan turns 75 today (May 24) – 55
years and a few months after he first arrived in New York City with a
repertoire of folksongs learned from Odetta and Woody Guthrie
records.

Within a relatively short time, Dylan was
one of the premier folk artists in Greenwich Village and was well on his way to
becoming, arguably, but certainly in my opinion, the most important and
influential songwriter ever.

I’m reminded now of something the young
Dylan said.

In 1963, talking to Nat Hentoff for
the liner notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan about his ability to pull
off a song as difficult as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Dylan said, “It's a
hard song to sing. I can sing it sometimes, but I ain't that good yet. I don't
carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Lead
Belly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be
able to someday, but they're older people.”

Dylan was all of 21 years old when he made
that statement. Woody Guthrie – hospitalized with the Huntington’s disease that
would kill him in 1967 – and Lightnin’ Hopkins were both then around 50. Big
Joe Williams was about 60 and Lead Belly had died in 1949 at 61.

Dylan now is significantly older than
Williams, Guthrie and Hopkins were then – and older than Lead Belly was when he
died. The young Dylan was highly influenced by those legendary artists who had
come along decades earlier – his own influence would soon surpass all others.
He changed what was possible to do in the context of a song.

And, yes, he does carry himself with all of
the musical gravitas that Williams, Guthrie, Lead Belly and Hopkins had then.

Dylan’s music has been part of my life for
most of my life. I bought Dylan’s first few LPs in 1967 when I was 13 and have
listened intently to everything he’s released over the past 50 years (and a
fair bit of what’s never been released). I’ve seen him in concert a bunch of
times and I’ve read most of the good books (including his own Chronicles
Volume One), and maybe a few too many of the bad books, that have been
written about Dylan over the years.

I was even introduced to him once – in 1975
– for about half a second. “Pleased to meet ya,” he said. I was 21, he was 34,
ages that now seem so young.

I’ve written about a bunch of Dylan albums
and books over the years in newspapers and magazines (and here on the Folk
Roots/Folk Branches blog), I’ve produced and hosted a bunch of radio
specials on him and his songs, but I don’t know Dylan. He is easily the most
enigmatic, the most unknowable, person I’ve ever encountered.

As I noted in my book review of Bob
Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz in a 2011 issue of Sing Out!
magazine, I’ve long thought that one of the reasons I so appreciate so much of
Bob Dylan’s oeuvre is that (I think) we’ve listened to so much of the same
music. To the traditional folk and blues songs, and to so many of the musicians
who played them. When Dylan sang, “no one can sing the blues like Blind
Willie McTell,” I knew what he was talking about because I’ve listened to
all those old Blind Willie McTell records. When he borrows lines or settings
from Woody Guthrie or Lead Belly or others, I know where they come from.
Dylan’s music is rooted ever so strongly in what Greil Marcus termed the
“old weird America,” the folk music and the folk-rooted blues and country music
that developed in particular regional locations and began to spread everywhere
in the first half of the 20th century.

This leads me to the point I wanted to make
when I started writing this little essay. Even before Dylan went electric at
the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, there have been commentators who’ve said
that Dylan left folk music behind. I don’t think that’s at all true. To this
day, Dylan’s songwriting continues to be rooted in the “old weird America.”
Dylan didn’t leave folk music behind when he embraced rock ‘n’ roll, he changed
what was possible in a folk music context; both in how it’s played and how it’s
expressed. I hear folk music at the heart of so much of Dylan’s songwriting --
from his earliest work to his most recent.

And anyone who thinks that folk music is
necessarily defined by acoustic guitars does not understand folk music.

Even Dylan’s two recent albums celebrating
the Great American Songbook, in my opinion, are less a homage to Frank Sinatra, than they are a
recognition that those classic songs somehow form part of that “old weird
America.” It’s not so much the circumstances of how and when they were written
as the context in which they are interpreted.

When jazz musicians like Charlie Parker
and Dizzy Gillespie developed bebop, they weren’t leaving jazz behind,
they were changing it; even though some of the traditional jazz greats like Louis
Armstrong were slow to accept or understand what Parker and Gillespie were
doing. Just like some in the folk establishment of 1965 were slow to accept and
understand what Dylan was doing. Bob Dylan changed folk music in much the same
way Charlie Parker changed jazz.

As far as I’m concerned, Dylan playing his
folk-rooted songs with rock musicians in his time is not very different from the
Weavers playing folksongs with the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra in
theirs.

Anyway, real rock ‘n’ roll, is a folk-rooted form. Just listen to the Sun-era
recordings of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash or Jerry Lee Lewis.
Listen to Wanda Jackson’s 1950s records, listen to Chuck Berry, Buddy
Holly, Bill Haley or Little Richard. The folk and blues
roots are there in that music.

By the way, Louis Armstrong was a
folksinger, too.

Happy Birthday, Bob!

(For folks in Montreal: there are Bob Dylan birthday celebrations tonight at Club Soda and Cafe Mariposa.)

Friday, May 20, 2016

Chaim
Tanenbaum’s self-titled debut album is a recording
I’ve been looking forward to hearing for – quite literally – more than 40
years.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, I produced
concerts in Montreal and ran a folk club, the Golem, and there were a bunch of
times that Chaim played at the Golem and at concerts I produced as a backup
musician and singer (and occasional lead singer) with Kate and Anna McGarrigle or with a group put together by Mountain City Four veteran Peter Weldon or with an early version
of the Stephen Barry Band. His voice
– as beautiful as a male’s voice can be and as powerful as he wanted it to be
when singing blues or gospel or old folksongs or ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll – was (and
is) a joy to hear. Many was the time that I tried to get Chaim to do his own
gig at the Golem. And there was at least a time or two or three that I
suggested he record an album. But Chaim always said no.

Between 1977 and 1980, I also did some tour
booking for Kate and Anna and Chaim was always in their band in those days. I
still vividly remember one night after a concert somewhere, the audience gone,
listening as Ken Pearson sat at the
Hammond B3 playing some old gospel songs while Chaim sang them out so
powerfully – his unamplified voice filling the hall on top of Kenny’s playing.
There was nothing like it.

Over the years, Chaim continued to work,
off and on, with Kate and Anna – and, also sometimes, with Loudon Wainwright III, Kate’s ex-husband, while continuing to shun
the spotlight for himself. In 1998, Kate and Anna did an album called The McGarrigle Hour on which they
collaborated with a bunch of musical friends and family members, including Chaim
who sang lead on several songs – including an original composition. When Kate
played the album for me at her house a few weeks before it came out I remember
saying to her that Chaim really should make his own record and she said
then that something might well be in the works. But, it didn’t happen.

Finally, though, at age 68 and in
retirement from his career teaching philosophy at Dawson College in Montreal
(where, by the way, I produced my first concerts as a student in 1972), Chaim
has recorded that debut album I’ve been waiting more than 40 years for. Working
with producer Dick Connette, whose
work in Last Forever I’ve long
admired, and some superb studio musicians, Chaim has created a masterwork.

While each of the
songs stands on its own, there is a theme of exile that runs through many –
perhaps all in some way or another – of the songs on Chaim Tannenbaum. And not just geographic exile from home (although
that is very much in evidence). There is a spiritual exile articulated in the
two gospel songs, there is exile from love, from society, and from the past.

Much of the album
is drawn from traditional sources and performers and Chaim’s treatment of songs
like “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” a Texas prisoners’ song collected by John Lomax, “Coal Man Blues,” recorded
by Peg Leg Howell in 1926, and
“Moonshiner,” whose sources are unclear, is masterful.

But the heart of
the album lies in three extraordinary songs written by Chaim. The first one we
hear is “London, Longing for Home,” perhaps the song in which the theme of exile
is most obvious. The song’s narrator spends nearly 10 minutes describing the
city, from its sites, to its rich history, to its dreary weather, and his life
there all the while longing to be back at home. Chaim uses the refrain from the
traditional song “Shenandoah” to represent the home he longs for.

The narrator in
“Brooklyn 1955” is a hard-luck guy whose exile is from his own history, from
the Brooklyn of his childhood cheering the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. His life
then had promise, excitement and purpose and stands in contrast to the
unfulfilled promises, emptiness and purposelessness he sees walking around that
same Brooklyn neighborhood as an old man.

The third of
Chaim’s songs, “Belfast Louis Falls in Love,” seems like it might be from the
perspective of the same character in “Brooklyn 1955,” or, at least, someone
similar. A hard-luck guy you might see drinking by himself in a bar in the
afternoon who is anxious to catch your eye so he can tell you his story. As in
the other two songs, Chaim’s superbly crafted lyrics and sweet melodies make
the listener care about these characters.

Every one of the
other songs is compelling for one reason or another but I want to call special
attention to Chaim’s lovely version of Kate McGarrigle’s “Talk to Me of
Mendocino,” an emotional plea from a lover left behind and longing to be asked
to come along (“Won’t you say, ‘Come with me’”). Ironically, in this version,
Loudon Wainwright III, the man who inspired the song about 45 years ago, joins
Chaim to sing the harmony vocal.

Each of the tracks
on the album is superbly arranged whether its Chaim solo, with another musician
or singer, or with a small ensemble. Among the MVPs are producer Dick Connette,
multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield,
and Loudon Wainwright III.

Chaim Tannenbaum is an essential
recording. It will be released on May 27.

About Me

I'm an editor, writer and broadcaster now based in Ottawa who has written about folk and roots music since the 1970s for Sing Out! Magazine and the Montreal Gazette and other Canadian newspapers. My radio show, Folk Roots/Folk Branches, was on CKUT in Montreal from 1994-2007. I'm now one of the rotating hosts of Saturday Morning on CKCU in Ottawa where my programming is based on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches format I developed at CKUT. I'm also one of the occasional co-hosts of Canadian Spaces on CKCU. In the 1970s and ‘80s I ran a folk club, the Golem, and produced most of Montreal’s folk-oriented concerts. I also booked tours for Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Priscilla Herdman, Rosalie Sorrels, Mason Daring & Jeanie Stahl, Bill Staines, Guy Van Duser & Billy Novick and Dakota Dave Hull & Sean Blackburn. In 2014, I was the recipient of the Ottawa Folk Festival's Helen Verger Award for "significant, sustained contributions to folk/roots music in Canada." In 2017, I was one of the inaugural inductees into the Folk DJ Hall of Fame created by Folk Alliance International.